I wouldn’t say it’s so much “natural law” as self preservation. We recognize that not stealing or killing promotes a stable society. We recognize that a family unit with a mother and a father promotes stability on a smaller level and works toward the good of ourselves and as a result, the collective. Failure to follow certain rules leads to violence and anarchy and thus, instability and a lack of personal safety.
Of course.
Natural law has nothing to do with self-preservation unless your talking about self-preservation of our souls and not of our bodies. The purpose of natural law is not so we all create great societies if we follow it. The purpose is it gives us insight into God’s will for us and what will ultimately make us happy which is being with him in Heaven. The fact that following natural law helps for making a successful society and is good for us in a physical sense as well is a side effect.
I am not sure I am understanding your question. None of those contradict each other.
So you can be strident and insulting, but others cannot be strident and disagree? And you did it yet AGAIN - how in the daylights do you know who and who are not unrepentant sinners??? You are throwing out accusations which I bet is a sin. Repent of your errors!Continued from previous post:
I am not telling anyone to go away. Again, I said explicitly I would rather Catholics struggling with teachings assent to them, work out their issues in private, and remain Catholics.
But more importantly I would rather people be honest about what they believe and take a stand accordingly. If you think “conscience” overrides all other considerations… well, this is not a Catholic belief. You cannot hold it and be in communion with the Catholic Church. So your options are to either repudiate the belief and be a good Catholic, hold on to the belief and be a bad Catholic, or hold on to the belief and become a good Protestant / some other denomination.
The Church is doing no favors by not telling its parishioners what is required of them, as was done to LaSainte (and, as I am learning, is endemic to the Church – my RCIA experience so far has been suboptimal). It would be better to empty out the churches completely and save a single soul then it would be to fill the pews and damn every last one of them.
No, people may not argue definitions. These matters have been decided by the Church. You may ask questions and ask for explanations but you may not criticize or suggest the Church is wrong, because Church teachings are inerrant and nonnegotiable. Because the Church was established by Christ and is protected from error by the Holy Spirit, that the gates of Hell may not prevail against it.
No. For Heaven’s sake, read my posts. You have a duty to mold your conscience to the teachings of the Church – which NECESSARILY requires that you make an effort to understand them. There is NO reason for anyone to “blindly” follow anything except out of willful and malicious ignorance.
You should not be commenting on your posts if you’re not bothering to read them.
Are you asking me specifically about this issue, or using it as one example in a larger question of how morals and conscience affect our ethical lives?
Larger issue.
If the former, I cannot comment as I am not familiar with the Pope’s call for a global central bank (I tried finding the document where it was announced but the only copies at the time were in Latin). Given the media’s tendency to mangle everything the Pope says (remember the supposed “Pope approves condoms for African AIDS crisis” hubbub a while back?) I am naturally suspicious of second-hand reports. But if he declares that the establishment of a centralized monetary authority is a matter of moral theology then I will commit to belief in it. More likely he is simply offering one possible solution to the very real problem of the division of our economic life from our moral life.
If the latter, morals are objective facts. Moral behavior is that behavior which conforms to our nature. And our nature is an objective reality which we are powerless to alter or change. They are therefore not matters of perspective or debate.
Maybe so. I don’t care. People are free to and ought to ask questions in the spirit of clarification, understanding, and good faith. They are not free, however, to disagree. Disagreement with Church teachings is error – and there is no right to error.
You are SO dead wrong. And this once again goes to the entire point of you telling people they are not welcome. Absolutely yes, people can disagree; there is no error whatsoever in disagreeing. There maybe error in not following; there is no error in disagreeing. None, Zero, Zip. And you do not get to decide that. There is no church teaching whatsoever stating people cannot disagree.
I have no interest in being lectured about charity by someone who accuses me of “posturing.” I am concerned in good faith for the souls of my fellow Catholics.
Yet you lecture? You are free to insult and state what you wish, but others are not? Hypocrisy.
The irony is that saying this sort of thing is ACTUALLY making an assumption about me based on knowledge you don’t have, the exact same thing you (falsely) accused me of earlier in your rant. Shame on you.
Have used nothing other than your own posts. Shame on you.
And repent of your errors!
Hey now, what have I said that’s been insulting?
I get that I’m strident. Like I said, the spirit of charity requires rebuking unrepentant sinners. We do no one any favors by pussyfooting around that particular duty.
What I mean though is that what people call Natural Law is really just good old-fashioned genetic and psychological conditioning designed to keep the species going Wanna propagate your gene pool? Have sex and don’t pull out. Wanna survive in the harsh world? You need large groups of people with their various roles to accomplish that, a.k.a. “society”. But a successful society is predicated on order and peace, so we can’t have anybody stealing or killing or sleeping with each other’s wives. This is what people call “Natural Law”, but it’s really just a way to keep the species going, and therefore it just makes sense that some of these things would change according to society’s needs. This is why war is sometimes necessary-the law about killing is suspended to protect certain societies that are considered to be “good”. At the beginning of the world, there were 2 people. “Be fruitful and multiply” made sense then for the survival of the species. But in areas where disease or famine is rampant, it would make sense to suspend these rules for the sake of the species, just like we do with killing. But when sex gets involved, people freak out and suddenly. Othing can be altered or changed. It’s like sex is “icky”, and has to be sterilized by doing it one way and one way only.
Sex is just a small part of what natural law has bearing upon just as teachings on sex are just a small part of the total of divine revelation. We know rape is wrong by order of natural law, and if rape was allowed wouldn’t that help keep the species going? Natural law would also make it immoral for a husband to for himself on his wife since this would deny the unitive bond. That is not ordered towards “keeping the species going” either. Natural law also does not have any bearing on the idea of sacramental marriage which I believe you would agree is a benefit for society. If natural law was solely ordered towards keeping the species going then the only purpose of sex would be procreation.
There are several things that could be addressed in that post, but one that jumps out is the implied reasoning that conscience is some type of oracle that speaks to us.
But it is. It’s ordered toward not only keeping the species gking, but protecting society as a whole, which is necessary for humanity to thrive. If people are going around raping people, there is discord and violence. Families and society start to break down. There is anarchy. People scatter. You have no society and none of the protection afforded by society. This is not good, so, no raping.
And I am not mocking God’s creation. I understand that we were designed and that everything has a purpose. My cheese grater was designed to grate cheese, but with a little good old-fashioned human ingenuity, I have discovered that it also makes a mighty fine lemon zester. I generally use it for cheese, but I see nothing wrong with repurposing it when the need arises.
Haha alright I agree. Following natural law would help propagate the species. You cannot say this is the purpose of natural law except out of correlation however. Life is precious to God though, so is it any surprise that he instilled within us a need to protect it and cherish it? The greater purpose of natural law though is to help us love God and love our neighbor as our self.
I don’t know what God originally had planned as the purpose of that cheese grater haha. It is apparent what the purpose of sex is though. To take a stab at the cheese grater though how about this:
Errr, no.
:yawn:
This gets into an issue in classical essentialism: accidental vs. essential properties.
No, what I am trying to say is that in order to keep the lower natural law intact the higher God’s Law manifestation by a person has to be limited.
:yawn:
:crying:
This gets into an issue in classical essentialism: accidental vs. essential properties.
An essential property is something without which something would not be what it is. An accidental property is something that is nonessential, i.e., without which it would still be what it is.
A good example is the heart. The heart is a muscle and it circulates blood. These two properties are essential to something’s being a heart. If it’s not a muscle but it circulates blood, it’s not a heart (but, say, a cardiopulmonary bypass machine); and if it’s a muscle but doesn’t circulate blood, then it’s not a heart but, say, a bicep or something. So these are essential properties: that which lacks the quality of muscleness or blood circulation is not a heart.
Other properties of a heart are accidental. So, for instance, an infant’s heart is much smaller than an elephant’s, but both are still hearts – so size must be accidental (i.e., nonessential). Likewise, the human heart has four chambers but a fly’s heart has no chambers at all; it’s simply a muscle shaped like a tube that winds throughout the body. So the number of chambers a heart has, and even the property of having chambers, is also accidental to a heart.
There are two ways one can err in discerning the essence (and thus the function) of a thing. One is by not including all the essential elements of a thing in one’s definition. So for instance, if I say “a heart is anything that is a muscle” and neglect to include the circulatory function, then I am including a lot of things that are not hearts, like, for instance, biceps and quadriceps. The other way to err is by including nonessential or accidential properties. So if I say “a heart is any muscle that circulates blood and has at least four chambers,” then I am failing to classify as hearts a lot of things that actually (obviously) are.
Your cheese grater is called a cheese grater for teleological reasons: because that’s what we designed it to do. There would be no sense in calling it a “cheese grater” if, for instance, the holes in it were too large to be of use in grating cheese. But just because it can be adapted for other uses doesn’t mean it’s not still essentially a cheese grater – the fact that you have to adapt it for use as a lemon zester is evidence of this. My heart naturally pumps blood, but I can introduce chemicals into it that cause it to stop doing that. That doesn’t mean my heart has no function – it just means its natural function (blood pumping) has been interfered with by some external agent (heart-stopping chemicals).
Why do you consider divine revelation to be “higher law”. If it was so high why did God take forever to get it to us? Natural law is the fundamental law inscribed in who we are and is a direct result of the design of God. Natural law is the basis on which we should start. Divine law builds off of natural law. You don’t have to spend a year in scripture study to figure out what Gen 2:24 meant.
What’s really important I think is that he is misunderstanding what is meant by “love thy neighbor” and “love the Lord your God.”
Your correct this is what I was trying to get across. I believe Jaaanosik is arguing that the supreme command that God has given us goes against our nature which God designed and made in His image… Hopefully the futility of this argument will be seen.
